Daniel

Начало книги

The crows were fighting. They dived towards the mud, flung themselves up again, and their cries cut through the wind. It had been raining a long time, this August of 1878. The restlessness of the crows was a portent of a long, hard winter. But one of the tenant farmers working below Kågeholm Castle, just north-west of Tomelilla, was bewildered by them. There was something strange about their agitation. And he had seen flocks of crows his whole life. Late in the afternoon he walked alongside a ditch that was filled with water. The crows kept squabbling, but when he approached too closely they fell silent and flapped off. And he, who had come to investigate what was bothering them, discovered at once what it was. A girl lay dead, half buried under the brushwood.

He realised at once that the girl had been murdered. Someone had stabbed her and slit her throat. But when he bent close over her face he noticed something odd, something that frightened him more than her slit throat. Whoever killed her had suffocated her with mud, which he had stuffed down her throat and into her nostrils. He had pressed so hard that he had broken her nose. The girl must have suffered an agonising death.

Читать дальше →